by Rachel Lee
Again he hung back a little, watching. Because no matter how hard he tried, he was suspicious right now. Firefighter arson accounted for less than 2 percent of all arsons, but rural departments were the usual source, and boredom the usual cause. He had young guys who might have been getting bored.
So he kept a watchful eye for anything that didn’t seem right, as much as it pained him. So far nothing had tripped any triggers in the back of his mind, but that didn’t mean anything. Right now not one of them had a cause to complain about boredom. Three fires in little more than a week? Around here, that was a lot of action.
But the knowledge of the arsonist troubled him, too. He was as aware as anyone of how much you could learn online these days, and with a few practice stabs someone could have figured how to burn the Buell place that way.
And that didn’t seem like a firefighter to him. Rarely did a firefighter ever set a blaze in an occupied building. Fred Buell and his family had escaped by the skin of their teeth.
“So how much longer are you gonna be here?” Donna asked Charity.
“Not long. I’m winding down.”
Donna looked satisfied at that answer. He’d overheard occasional teasing that she was sweet on him, but he’d never seen any sign of it himself. As the only woman in the department, Donna was on the firing line for that sort of thing.
But finally Charity rose and announced that she needed to get back to her paperwork.
“What about the training session next week?” Randy asked.
“I don’t know,” Charity answered. “I might be headed back to Atlanta by then. I appreciate the offer, though.”
“Keep it in mind,” said Ken. “It’s on Monday.”
Charity nodded, smiled and waved to everyone.
Wayne straightened. “I’ll drive you.”
“Not that far, Chief. Hoofing it won’t kill me.”
“I’ll take you anyway. I need to get something from home.”
That caused a few knowing hoots, but he ignored them. Donna remained placid, her face revealing nothing. Okay, then. The rumors were probably just that.
* * *
“So what’s up?” Charity asked as they wound through the streets to his home to pick up her car. She was capable of walking the few blocks, and it was a beautiful day, although clouds had begun to move in. She’d enjoyed her time with the firefighters, getting her dose of the camaraderie she’d missed. The surprising thing was how easily they’d welcomed her. She’d half expected a roasting, but they hadn’t given her one. Maybe people here had better manners, at least with a stranger.
“To start, my daughter has invited you to join us for dinner. She’s having her boyfriend over and was glad that I wanted to bring you. Are you on?”
Meeting his daughter? She should have shied away, because getting deeper into the growing quicksand with Wayne was clearly not wise. Yet she was curious about Linda and his home life. She could have groaned at herself. “That could be fun,” she said cautiously, still hedging.
“It might be a little tense. Jeremy is new in Linda’s life and he gets as stiff as a recruit in basic training around me.”
She laughed. “Been there, done that.”
“Haven’t we all at one point or another? When I first started dating my ex, we were both seventeen and her father terrified me. I think he got a kick out of it.”
“Entirely possible.” So, high school sweethearts? She wanted to know more about that, but didn’t want to pry into potentially painful places.
“Dinner?”
“Yes,” she said, giving in to her impulse. A plane flight in her near future was beginning to look like her last lifeline.
“Great.” He flashed her a smile that faded rapidly. “I talked to Gage about the possibility that someone practiced on abandoned properties for the Buell fire.”
“That must have made his day. He’s not going to share that, is he?” Mark Vincent had been very clear about not spreading ideas.
“No, he gets it. Now he’s wondering how to check out possibilities without leaking anything.”
Relief filled her. “I wouldn’t be surprised if Mark, my investigator friend, sets up a similar fire to check it out. This is a new one. At least it’s new when it’s done on purpose.”
“I know. Charity...” He hesitated. They weren’t far from his house now.
“Yes?” she asked finally.
“Are you coming or going?”
The question nearly stunned her. The rules of engagement were clear. He knew that. Her job was back in Atlanta and her stay here would be necessarily brief. But her heart skipped a few times, and a dead hope sparked. “Meaning?” she managed to ask, although it was suddenly hard to drag in air.
“You keep telling everyone you’ll be leaving soon, but you kind of told me you wanted to hang around. Which is it?”
“In theory I should leave as soon as I talk to Mrs. Buell,” she said, aware of a heaviness inside her.
“In reality?”
“In reality I want to hang around. I still want to do more work on this arson, for one.” She realized she’d just given him a huge opening. She was relieved when he didn’t ask her other reasons, because she wasn’t at all sure she could have explained. All she knew was that in a couple of short days she was developing an attachment to this town and to Wayne.
He pulled up into his driveway, and she prepared to climb out and get her own car. Just then a young woman in jeans and a T-shirt bounced out of the house, smiling broadly and waving.
The spitting image of her father, Charity thought as she climbed out. A beautiful young woman on the cusp of life. “Hey,” the girl said, “you must be Dad’s colleague.”
Ignoring her father, she came straight to Charity. “He has good taste in colleagues. I was expecting squat and square with bad skin.”
Charity couldn’t help but laugh. “You look a lot like your dad. And he couldn’t help it. My company sent me out here.”
Wayne rounded the front of his truck, smiling faintly. “Behave, Lindy.”
“I am behaving,” the girl said cheerfully. “I complimented your colleague.”
Charity wondered if she heard a slight emphasis on the word colleague. Maybe. “I’m Charity Atkins. Just Charity. And you’re Linda, right?”
“None other. Say, why don’t you come in and keep me company while I cook. Dad always has some other place he needs to be, but it would be fun to gab with you.”
“Am I being sent away?” Wayne pretended to complain. “And Charity was saying something about needing to work...”
“Work can always wait a few hours,” Linda said decisively. “It doesn’t go away, you know.” She eyed her father significantly.
“And some doesn’t wait, as well you know, Lindy.”
“Firefighters,” she drawled, then grabbed Charity’s hand. “Say you’ll stay.”
Charity couldn’t resist. This girl was a pistol. “I’d love to.”
Suddenly she felt as if she was being watched. Turning, she saw a car moving slowly down the street. Probably someone just checking out the stranger in town. She was turning away as she recognized the driver. Donna. The woman smiled and waved as she drove by. Charity waved back.
“I’ll be back soon,” Wayne said. “Assuming something else doesn’t catch fire.”
The house was warm and welcoming inside, a cozy place full of color and cheer and smelling wonderfully of roasting chicken. Clearly not a bachelor pad. Linda led her into a surprisingly spacious kitchen, and offered her a stool at the central island.
“What can I do to help?” Charity asked immediately.
“Just keep me company,” Linda replied. “I like to talk while I cook. I don’t get the opportunity often.”
“Your dad works long hours, huh?”<
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Linda smiled and shrugged. “He has to. What he does is important. Besides, these arsons have him really on edge and I can’t blame him. One of the Buell kids is a freshman, and I talked to him about it. That was a heck of a terrifying experience for all of them. He kept saying the ceiling was on fire.”
“I heard,” Charity said. “I talked to Mr. Buell.”
Linda reached for a bowl that appeared to be full of lumpy flour. “I hope you like biscuits.”
“I love them.”
“Roast chicken, cream gravy, vegetables and biscuits.” She laughed. “Dad says Jeremy eats like a linebacker. I guess he’s right because I always need to cook like a crowd is coming.”
“That sounds delicious. Already it smells wonderful.”
“I love the smell of roasting chicken,” Linda confided. “Or browning pork. I’m not so keen on beef, though, so I make Dad grill it outside when we have it.”
Charity felt herself grinning.
“So you like my dad?” Linda asked.
Charity nearly froze. She hadn’t expected such bluntness from this young woman. “I, um, well, I only got here a couple of days ago.”
“It doesn’t have to take long,” Linda said with the wisdom of inexperienced youth. “You married or divorced?”
“No.”
At that Linda frowned. “Guys must be all over you. You gay?”
That startled Charity into a momentary silence. She’d never been asked that before. This girl was blunt to a fault. But those dark eyes, so like her Dad’s despite the color difference, were watching her expectantly. “Uh, you’d have to ask my last boyfriend.”
Linda giggled. “Okay. None of my business. Dad would kill me if he knew I asked you, so don’t tell him. Since Mom left, he’s all about work and raising me. I’m leaving for college in August, and I worry about him.”
Charity felt she had been caught flat-footed here. How could she respond to that? If Linda thought Charity was the one who would... What? What was Linda thinking? “Where are you going with this?”
Linda shrugged and went to wash her hands before she started kneading the biscuit dough. “I make drop biscuits, not the rolled kind.”
“I like them better. More brown.”
“Good. Where am I going? I don’t know. I think I’m papering my dad with signs that say Eligible Man. Not that it’s worked so far.”
Charity was touched, but waded in cautiously. “It’s hard to get rolling again when you’ve had a relationship sour.”
“Have you?”
“Several. One just a few months ago.”
Linda nodded. “What was the problem?”
“My job. I travel too much.”
“My dad could say the same thing. The job part, I mean. When Mom left it was all about how boring this town was and how he was always working. I don’t get the part about the town. I go spend summers with her in Denver every year, and I just don’t get the fascination. Maybe there aren’t as many activities here, but I have friends. That seems more important, to me anyway. And I don’t get it about Mom. I mean, she grew up here. It’s just not that bad.”
“It seems like a very nice town.”
“It is,” Linda said firmly. “Anyway, sometimes I think Dad still wonders if something else was going on.”
How awful, Charity thought. Her breakups had been bad enough, and she’d seen them coming with the increasing complaints about her frequent traveling, how it was impossible to make any plans and so on. How much harder it must have been coming from the mother of your child, someone you’d been with since high school.
If Charity sometimes wondered if her breakups had been about more than her job, how much more must Wayne wonder?
Linda began to drop sticky dough onto the baking sheet. “I hope Dad’s not late,” she said in the tone of one who was used to it.
“His hours must be hard on you, too.”
“Not usually. He made a point of being here more often when I was younger. And lately is no real example. I think I leave him in the lurch more often than he does me.”
Another sad comment in a different way, Charity thought. “A girl has to have a life.”
Linda looked up with a grin. “You got that right. You’ll like Jeremy. I just wish he didn’t get so nervous around Dad. I mean, Dad’s an okay guy and he’s never hard on my boyfriends. Well, except once. When I was fifteen I started hanging out with this guy my dad really didn’t like.”
“So what did he do?”
“Asked a million questions. The guy didn’t like feeling as if he was under a microscope.”
Charity smiled. “How did you feel?”
“Mad at first. It turned out Dad was right, though. Tom had never been in trouble that I knew of, so Dad must have heard something or smelled something. Who knows? Tom’s in jail now and Dad was right.”
Close call, Charity thought. And Wayne sounded like one great father. Apparently work didn’t keep him from paying attention to what was going on at home.
And just listening to Linda spoke highly of Wayne’s parenting skills. To be fair, she added his ex to the good-parent list, since the woman took her daughter every summer. A well-adjusted young woman chatted with her while making dinner and expressing her love for her father in multiple ways, including admitting he had been right about one of her boyfriends. Charity figured that was all pretty cool.
But Linda was worrying about her father’s future. That touched her. Instead of being selfish in some way, she truly wanted Wayne to find happiness. Charity wondered if she would have been as generous at that age.
Deciding they needed to move to safer ground, Charity asked, “Are you excited about starting college this fall?”
Indeed she was. Linda was off and running about how she was going to Boulder, had arranged to room with a friend and was nervous about everything from classes, to homework, to being among so many strangers.
As open as a book, Charity thought as she listened with a smile. Bright, fresh and full of life. It was enough to make even a woman of her age feel old.
Well, not really old, but it got her thinking about Linda’s joie de vivre and where she’d left her own. Had it been the boyfriends or the job, or a combination of both, that had left her less than happy with life?
It was definitely something she needed to think about.
* * *
The chicken got picked clean, the biscuits disappeared mostly into Jeremy’s mouth and Charity enjoyed herself even though Jeremy was pretty quiet, as Wayne had warned her. While not saying much, his expression was friendly and open, and she suspected he’d be totally different if he weren’t in terror of the fire chief.
Not that Wayne seemed to be trying to unnerve him. He made a few attempts to draw the young man into conversation, but didn’t press him in an uncomfortable way.
Probably no need to, Charity thought. She’d bet Wayne already knew the family and had a fair measure of Jeremy.
He was quick to help Linda with dishes afterward, and Wayne and Charity found themselves banished from the task.
“Time alone for them,” Wayne murmured as they made their way to the living room with coffee. “The less of us, the better.”
Charity laughed, suspecting he was right. “There’s nothing quite like young love.”
All of a sudden his gray eyes seemed to spark. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that.”
He struck the match as simply as that. In an instant, Charity became intensely aware of her awakening body, of the tingling that sprang to life between her legs. She felt as if every cell in her body was reaching out for this man.
“Don’t do that,” she said quietly.
His eyes danced. “I didn’t do a thing.”
“Right,” she said sarcastically. If this guy was still m
ooning over his dead marriage, he showed no signs of it. As for her... Well, she ought to be careful. Only a short time after her breakup with Ted, she might be on the rebound. Hard to tell, except it still hurt sometimes to think of him. Or rather, to think of the way he had rejected her.
Wayne drew the curtains against the deepening twilight. She didn’t sit, but walked around the small living room, looking at the prints on the walls. They were inexpensive copies of Monet, Chagall, Van Gogh and even a Picasso pen-and-ink of a toreador and bull. Beautifully framed, though. She mentioned it.
“On the rare occasions when I have time,” Wayne said, “I like to work with wood. I made the frames.”
“I’m definitely impressed.”
He laughed. “Lipstick on a pig?”
She smiled. “Not many of us can own original art. The frames are a beautiful touch, so no. Don’t think of it that way.”
He sat at the end of the couch. “Linda’s my decorator. I like what she’s done.”
“She has a good eye.” Charity turned slowly, taking in a room that had been filled gently with color and contrast in such a way that nothing overpowered anything else. “In fact, an amazing eye.” Especially considering her youth. Teens were wont to overdo everything.
“I think so.”
Jeremy and Linda made record time on the dishes and appeared to announce they were going to the movies. “I might be staying with Charlene tonight,” Linda said. “I’ll call and let you know.”
“Okay. Have fun, guys.”
“That was a great dinner,” Charity called after her.
Linda winked. “The way to a guy’s heart and all that.” Then she and Jeremy were gone.
Charity turned and saw Wayne sitting with his face in his hand. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said, dropping his hand. “It’s just that she’s too saucy by far and growing up too damn fast.”
“She’s sure on the lookout for you.”
He sighed, but couldn’t quite bury the smile. “She hasn’t figured out that trotting various fillies nearby isn’t sufficient.”